Literature and culture of the Elizabethan 1590s and New Elizabethan 1950s

This dissertation argues that predictions of a New Elizabethan Age, made with such ease at Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953, in fact came true: to look at phenomena from Elizabeth II's reign through an Elizabethan lens is to notice striking correspondences between late-sixteenth-century England and mid-twentieth-century Britain, the Elizabethan 1590s and New Elizabethan 1950s. Four such correspondences are the focus of this dissertation: the Troy myth, used to bolster claims of Tudor legitimacy in the early years of Britain's imperial ambitions, returns in British literature after the Second World War, just as the British Empire is dissolving and the United States is in the ascendant; the Actaeon myth that underlies the cult of Diana, the Moon goddess, in Elizabethan poetry shapes both astronaut responses to the 1969 Moon-landing and mourning following the 1997 death of Princess Diana; Elizabethan fears of mutability and decay uncannily anticipate New Elizabethan fears of radioactive decay and genetic mutability; and the repressed Queen Elizabeth of the 1590s, ageing, unmarried and childless, returns in the New Elizabethan Age in the person of the ostentatiously effeminate London homosexual--the British queen.